My growing prominence began to get on Dad’s nerves. He wanted to make me the head of IBM, but he didn’t like sharing the limelight. So he was contradictory in his attitude toward me. When I wasn’t around, he’d tell people that I was a world beater and that without question I was going to run the company someday. But then Dad would see me accomplish something—he’d be in the audience when I gave a speech, or he’d read in the paper that I’d joined a charity board—and he wouldn’t say a word about it. When you got right down to it, Dad wasn’t always so comfortable with the idea that Tom Watson Jr. was making a name for himself. This was a side of Dad I had never known was there. During all my years as an aimless boy making poor grades in school, he’d given me nothing but love and support. As a young salesman I’d gotten so much help it was embarrassing. And as I went into the business community, Dad quietly saw to it that all kinds of doors were springing open. But when it came to power, real power of the kind he held over the lives of tens of thousands of people, my father made me fight him for every scrap.

That’s why I got so upset in 1948 when it looked to me as if Dad was about to hand over half of IBM to my brother. I was now a vice president, but Dick had stayed in the army and then gone back to Yale, where he finished a bachelor’s degree with a major in international relations. He’d been at IBM less than a year and was just getting started as a salesman. I definitely thought of him as my junior in the company. But Dad was an old man in a hurry. He had dreams of his two boys running IBM together, and with his seventy-fifth birthday looming, he knew there might not be time to put Dick through the same tough apprenticeship I’d had. He needed to set Dick up in a way that would allow the two of us to work together and not fight too much, because someday there would be no one around to arbitrate.

For years, before I had any successes of my own, the idea of Dick getting ahead really bothered me. Even though he was five years younger, I thought he was in many ways my superior. He’d gotten into Yale, and his grades were a hell of a lot better than mine had been in college. He was a better athlete. He had a natural command of languages and an easier way of relating to other people—he was much more gracious, a relaxed guy, very charming. He could sing and he could yodel and he was a real entertainer at parties. Seeing Dick do so well had made me feel like the black sheep. I thought people admired him because he lived up to what Dad wanted, and I didn’t. But I began to resent Dick much less after my successes during the war. Now I had great ambition for myself, and also felt warmly toward him. He was my brother, and I wanted him to succeed too. My gripe was with Dad—it burned me up that he seemed to see us as total equals. I’d been at IBM three years before the war and almost three years since—they weren’t all happy years but I wanted credit for them—and here was Dick, who’d been in the company eight months, being handed the world on a silver platter.

Dad’s idea was to give me the U.S.A. and Dick everything else. He made a place for Dick by taking our offices and factories on six continents and forming a subsidiary company. It was called IBM World Trade, and it was the great labor of my father’s old age. Looking back on it today, I’d say it was one of the most astonishing accomplishments in Dad’s long career. And just as Dad wanted, Dick took it and ran it flawlessly, making it everything Dad hoped it would be. But when Dad first thought it up, I fought him harder on it than I’d ever fought before. I bucked so hard that I damn near got disowned.

Our foreign operations at the end of World War II were pretty thin. IBM had scores of offices and factories abroad—we were represented in seventy-eight countries. Unfortunately, that number was much more impressive than the profits generated. In 1939, for example, only about one eighth of IBM’s profits came from abroad, and of course the percentage fell during the war. The “foreign department,” as it was called, seemed pretty unimportant compared with our booming business in the U.S. But Dad thought otherwise. I can remember going to a meeting in the spring of 1946, where I watched him chew out Charley Kirk and George Phillips about the wretched state of our overseas business. He called it “nothing short of a disgrace,” which wasn’t really fair, because the lion’s share of foreign sales always came from Europe, which was in a shambles. At the end of the meeting Dad declared that we must set up the foreign department as a separate company and make it stand on its own. But he gave no specific orders, and everyone figured he was just blowing off steam.

A couple of months later I came up with an idea that helped revive the European operation. The problem over there was not lack of demand; many of our customers had survived the war and were eager to get punch-card machines. But our offices found it almost impossible to deliver the right gear—they were crippled by shortages and by widespread import restrictions that made it impossible to bring in new machines. An inspiration came to me at home in the middle of the night. I woke up and said, “As-is machines!” The American armed forces had been turning in millions of dollars worth of punch-card equipment that was no longer needed. We took those machines—some with the mud of the battlefield still on them—and sent them to the European factories to be refurbished. At first people thought our employees would be insulted to be given used, dirty equipment to fix. But they loved it when they saw that with a few hours’ work and a new coat of paint, those machines were something they could sell.

As far as Dad’s idea of setting up a world trade subsidiary was concerned, I gave it no more thought. But a year or two later, after Dick joined the company, it hit me that our international operations were reinvesting a large portion of their profits rather than turning the money over to IBM in New York. I discovered this because we needed the cash to keep growing in the U.S.—expanding a rental operation requires a lot of dollars. The then manager of the foreign department was a big, genial fellow named Joe Wilson. When I called him in to ask where the profits were going, he said Dad had ordered him to try to expand abroad as rapidly as we were doing in the U.S. I thought that was utter folly, but Dad ignored me. Before long I heard him talking again about splitting off the foreign department. He wanted it to have its own executives, its own board of directors, and much more autonomy to do the great things he expected. With an enormous leap of logic he said, “The United States has six percent of the world’s population, and the rest of the world has ninety-four percent: someday the World Trade Company is going to be larger than the U.S. company.”

My friend Al Williams, for one, thought this was very profound, but I thought Dad was being simplistic and naive. We had endless opportunity and little risk in the U.S., it seemed to me, while it was hard to imagine us getting anywhere abroad. Latin America, for example, seemed like a bottomless pit. Many of those countries were running their economies in such a way that for us ever to make a dollar and get it home was going to be impossible. Meanwhile, even with the success of as-is machines, our business in Europe was far from healthy. Trade was still paralyzed, the Marshall Plan was only on the drawing board, and it was unclear when we’d ever be able to start manufacturing again.

The solution my father came up with shows how resourceful he really was. He invented a way for IBM’s offices in Europe to have their own free trade across international borders. Within IBM, he created a kind of common market ten years before the real one existed—and unlike the Common Market, my father’s worked right from the start. Our European factories were not giant plants like Endicott or Poughkeepsie; the biggest one employed about two hundred people and the rest were more like shops. Dad made these little units dependent on one another. He came up with the simple rule that each factory had to make parts not only for the country in which it was situated, but also for export. So if you were making keypunch mechanisms in France, perhaps 60 percent of your output would be used in machines for the French market, but 40 percent had to be exported to assembly lines somewhere else—in Italy and Germany, say. By shipping those parts, you earned foreign-exchange credits—which you then could use to import parts of some other type that, for instance, a Dutch IBM plant might be making for you. Because tariff barriers were so high, we shipped finished machines only to the smaller countries where we had no plants, and few IBM machines were 100 percent manufactured in the country where they were finally assembled. This trading around allowed us to operate on a much larger scale, and far more efficiently, than any company that was bound to a single country.

Dad’s second great innovation before turning World Trade over to Dick was to hire down-and-out aristocrats and use their connections to get our business rolling again. Dad had always been inclined toward highborn people, and by now he had the necessary prestige to attract them to IBM when they needed work. Even though the form of government had changed in most European countries, Dad understood that the aristocracy had selling power. Sometimes he’d find out he’d gotten a man who was dead from the neck up, but most of those he picked did very well. Baron Daubek of Rumania covered all of Eastern Europe. He had so much brass that he’d fly in behind the Iron Curtain and collect rentals from the guys who had taken our companies away. Another of our aristocrats was Baron Christian de Waldner, a French Huguenot who became known as “Mister IBM of France.” He was a frail-looking but tough man who built up IBM to be one of France’s largest companies. De Waldner would fight with anybody to get what he thought the company needed. He even convinced Dad that to succeed in France, IBM had to bend to local customs, going so far as to serve wine at lunch in the cafeteria.

Dad didn’t advertise the fact that he was clearing the way for my brother until he took Dick around Europe with him in late 1948. It was Dad’s first visit to the Continent after the war. He traveled around for several months organizing his factories and renewing old ties, and he kept Dick with him the entire time, introducing him as his “assistant.” That made it pretty clear to everybody who IBM’s next great internationalist was going to be.

I wish I’d thought back on my own experience of having sales pushed my way and realized how hard things must be for my brother. As the youngest in our family, he was low man on the totem pole. Not only did he have Dad over him, but he had me five years in front. To complicate things still further, there was our sister Jane, who was always Dad’s favorite. So Dick grew up in a very, very tough position. Maybe because of this, Dick’s relationship with Dad was different from mine. If Dad got mad at me, I’d get mad right back and we’d fight. My brother had just as strong a temper as I did, but he seemed to believe that in order to get ahead, he had to take what T. J. dished out. Knuckling under was traumatic for Dick. He had asthma, and sometimes when my father lit into him he’d get so short of breath he’d need a shot of adrenaline to bring his breathing back to normal.

I was amazed at how far Dick let Dad go. That tour they took of Europe, for example, was supposed to be my brother’s honeymoon. In June of 1948 he’d married a superb girl from Syracuse, New York, named Nancy Hemingway. They were going to sail to England, and of all the pushy things, Dad asked if he and Mother could go along. I think Dad may have felt his time was running out. Dick must have had misgivings about combining his honeymoon with a business trip, but he said yes. So off they sailed, the four of them together. Even then Dad didn’t let up. One night they were in Stockholm, staying at the Grand Hotel, and were scheduled to have dinner with the king of Sweden. When it was time to leave, Dad noticed that Nancy’s dress wasn’t floor length. He asked her, “Do you have a long dress?” and she explained nervously that she hadn’t brought one along. Dad lit into her and said, “You are going to disgrace me and my family,” and Nancy burst into tears. That was where Dick finally drew the line. He said, “Look, old man. You can tell me anything you want because I’m your son. But don’t talk to Nancy that way. She is my wife and has nothing to do with you.” That really knocked Dad back. He apologized, and they went, and Nancy dined with the king in her short dress.

Dad came back from that trip and sat down with me in October to tell me how he was going to divide up the world. World Trade—Dick’s company—would build and sell machines everywhere except the United States; IBM Domestic—my side-would be confined to the continental U.S., but as the parent company it would also handle aspects of the business like financing and research and development for all of IBM. For the time being Dad was going to add the chairmanship of World Trade to his usual duties, with a senior man named Harrison Chauncey as number two and Dick as a vice president—the same rank I had! I told Dad that splitting off World Trade was the worst idea I’d ever heard. I said darkly, “If you do this, you’ll live to regret it.”

He looked at me with total innocence and said, “Why do you object to this so much?”

There were a lot of plausible business arguments I could have used. But the question caught me so completely off guard that the only thing that came to mind was personal: “There’s no place for me to travel! I like to travel!”

That made my father smile. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, and you can travel there.”

I was so embarrassed that I agreed and left his office feeling totally stymied. Later that week he called me in, this time with Dick, to discuss the plan again. I started to present my business objections one at a time. Setting up World Trade would only multiply bureaucracy and expenses, I said; and I predicted that the minute World Trade was separate, it would start developing its own products, thereby wrecking IBM’s manufacturing efficiency. Dick took the diplomatic course of sitting by and not saying a word, but I sensed a rising tide of impatience in Dad. The objection that finally caused him to flash was my pressing him on who should get Canada. Our business there produced a big cash flow and I hated to lose it. There was no reason for giving Canada to World Trade except that they needed the cash more than we did. It was a real weak spot in Dad’s plan. I could see him bristle, and I really bored in. I said, “Anybody can see that Canada belongs with the domestic company! If World Trade can’t stand on its own without Canada, then you shouldn’t split it off at all.”

Dad rose up and thundered, “What are you trying to do, prevent your brother from having an opportunity?” Those words killed me. They set me up against my brother, who was right there. Dad would say that kind of thing without thinking, because he always aimed to win. He used the Marquis of Queensberry rules if he had time to think about them, but when he was in a corner, it didn’t matter what the rules were; he wanted to accomplish his purpose. There was really nothing more I could say. Dick and I rode down in the elevator with Dad and walked him outside to where he had a limousine waiting. He got in and rolled down the window and said, “Now remember, boys, stay together.” I was devastated. Dick and I went back upstairs and I tried to paper over the rift between us by saying I hadn’t meant anything personal. Having won his point, Dick was generous enough not to rub it in.

The old man went ahead and organized the IBM World Trade Company in early 1949, formally splitting it off as a wholly owned subsidiary a year later. Most of my fears turned out to be unfounded. World Trade did not drag IBM down. It capitalized on Europe’s economic recovery, financed itself through its own profits and foreign borrowings, and grew as fast as the American company. Dad did not insult me by giving Dick equal rank. He made Dick a vice president, sure enough, but he also gave me the big promotion I’d been working so hard to earn. In September of 1949 I became executive vice president, the job Kirk had when he died. I didn’t even lose my dreamed-of chance to travel in Europe. Since the U.S. Army stayed there in force, and its punch-card installations were the responsibility of the domestic IBM, there were ample opportunities for me to go around inspecting.

As my brother rose at World Trade, I made great efforts to stay out of his way and help in any manner I could. I bowed out of the International Chamber of Commerce, so he could take my place. I took him to a meeting of the American Society of Sales Executives and introduced him around. I avoided any discussions of European business or international affairs. Later on, when he needed executives who knew how to twist tails and produce results, I sent him some of my best men—most notably Gilbert Jones, my former executive assistant, whom Dick chose many years later as his successor as chairman of World Trade. I thought Dick was extraordinarily able, and in our off-hours we grew very close. We often took our wives and children on ski trips together, and Nancy and Olive became best friends.

None of this was enough to defuse the tension in our family. Dad remained suspicious that I was secretly out to undermine my brother, and Dick, taking his cues from Dad, played very close to the vest. He would discuss World Trade with Dad but never with me. The situation made it very difficult over the next few years for the three of us to do business. There were aspects of World Trade in which the domestic company had to be involved, since we were the parent—important matters like financing and product planning. But when Dad and Dick and I would meet to talk about IBM’s future, there was constant strife. Even the smallest difference of opinion between Dick and me would cause Dad to question my motives, and this in turn led to bitter fights—always between Dad and me, with Dick sitting silently by. Usually this happened behind closed doors, but at one point I blew up at them in public. We were at the Metropolitan Club, and Dad told me to keep my opinions on Europe to myself. I completely lost my temper, told them that one business could not have two heads, and swearing loudly at both my father and Dick, I stormed out. I don’t remember the details, but I remember the outcome, because I thought it was the end of my IBM career.

I spent the night paralyzed with remorse for my outburst. The next morning Dad buzzed me up to his office. “Young man,” he said, “if you fail in IBM or in life, it will be because your temper did you in.” He dismissed me without letting me say a word. That was just as well, because too much was at stake. We were right on the brink of estrangement—both of us felt it—and neither of us wanted to jump over the edge. Dad came very close to firing me. Many years later, after his death, I found a note he had drafted at the time. It was written in pencil on the back of a luncheon menu, and it said:

I gave a great deal of thought to this relationship between Dick and you and came to the decision that if the past differences were to continue, you and he must part. I am writing this as I want you to have plenty of time to look about.

Fortunately he never sent it. I’d have felt shattered, but the immediate consequence would have been to escalate the fight. I’d have gone to him and said, “You’re threatening me. Let’s get this out on the table right now.” I was very peppery with him, and I’ve often wondered whether I behaved that way because of courage or because I thought I had power over him as his firstborn. I never could decide which. But Dad knew it was much more effective to let me stew in guilt. The more I thought about my outburst, the more miserable I felt.

The only way to be sure of ending one of our battles was to write. I have quite a collection of the apologies I sent him during the years after the war. Following the incident at the Metropolitan Club, I wrote him this:

Dear Dad,

I have given a great deal of thought to what you said about my temper and believe that you have put your finger on the one thing which can bring to an end a career which otherwise can be very successful. The lack of control of temper and the tendency to think last and speak first is something which has hampered me in my dealings not only with you but with my own family, my business associates and my friends. My last break at the Metropolitan Club and my swearing at you is an act which I will never forget and from which my heart will never fully recover. Family conferences with you and Dick are something that I’ve looked forward to all my life and for me to thoroughly ruin one of our first is something for which I owe not only you but also Dick a real apology.…

You mentioned … how you wanted to feel that I would and could take a place as a rallying point for the family as its oldest and really if I can successfully do this it will fulfill my greatest ambition. Of course, you can never have confidence in my ability to do so until I prove to you that I can control Tom Watson Jr. and think before I speak. You are a practical businessman and have built IBM on fact not promises.…

Believe me, I have and will continue to pay for my statement at the Met. Club but that’s my fault. If you see fit to watch from now on you’ll see a change that will please you. Temper will be watched and also stupid jealousy and I’ll be a different and better son and brother.

With sincere intentions & great love,
Tom                                                

This was one of our worst clashes, but Dad and I got into big arguments practically every month. We’d reconcile and try to cooperate, but pretty soon he’d second-guess me on a decision or I’d express an opinion on something he thought was none of my business, and we’d go at it again. In retrospect I realize what a toll these flare-ups must have taken on Dad. Another of the papers he left at his death was a meditation he wrote around his seventy-fifth birthday. From the way it reads, he is smarting from something I said. I’ve obviously accused him of driving able executives out of IBM so he can surround himself with yes-men. He feels depressed and haunted by the names of those who have died, or quit, or been fired. He thinks Dick and I are anxious for him to leave—something he’s fiercely determined not to do.

Nobody should have the right to challenge my knowledge of IBM due to my 35 years experience. Think what I could have done with the guidance of someone of experience.

I will give all I have got to leaving IBM with enough people in the Executive end who believe in me. Joe Rogers, Fred Nichol and Charlie Kirk, Titus & Ogsbury all helped me—the latter 2 thought my policies were not good & they brought great damage to us. That is why I had to let out two vice-presidents. That was the hardest job I ever did in my whole work in IBM—but I had to do it.

The reason I’m sticking on the job & working is because the leading industrialists and bankers of the world seem to be unanimous that I have accomplished something worthwhile in building a sound business & in establishing certain policies which have proven to be beneficial to all of the employees of IBM & last but not least to the public we serve & the stockholders who entrust us with their investment. The moral to this is: It has always been my hope & ambition that my two sons would be ambitious & determined to prepare themselves to carry on the IBM Company & put the name of Watson far above its present standing in the industrial, social & economic world & as a result they will each have a greater opportunity to be of service to their family, relatives & worthwhile institutions and deserving people everywhere.

I am equally proud of both my sons and I’m also proud of what they have accomplished in the short time of their respective service with the company and I know that both my sons realize that experience is the greatest teacher.

I’m glad I never saw the note at the time. I’d have felt guilty as hell, and probably I’d have gotten mad, because Dad made it sound as if our apprenticeships were never going to end. I’d have started fighting all over again.

It didn’t occur to me then, but I suspect that my sister Jane was behind some of these disputes. Jane had Dad’s ear, and at that stage in our lives, she and I didn’t get along very well. She’d have seen the World Trade issue in terms of rivalry because she was so competitive herself. If you had to pick who was the strongest and hardest driving of T. J. Watson’s children, it would be a toss-up between Jane and me. She was a handsome woman, tall and dark haired, and she’d already made a name for herself in Washington and New York social circles. She had Dad’s ability to get to know and charm the top people, but it was going to take another twenty years before she and I learned to get along.

Dad’s feelings for Jane were complicated. I could never see what he wanted for her, and maybe he didn’t know himself. It probably never crossed his mind that she might have a career, even though women executives were not unheard of at that point, and IBM actually had a woman vice president in charge of our field force for systems service. But Dad didn’t seem to want Jane to get married, either. She stayed single until she was thirty-three years old, and to me it seemed as if she’d come close to wrecking her life for Dad. She’d had several suitors, but he’d driven them away. It wasn’t until after the war that Jane found an acceptable man. His name was John Irwin II, and he was tall, attractive, and probably the best dancer I ever saw. Jack never drank, never smoked, but boy could he dance. He’d been president of his class at Princeton all four years and captain of the track team. His war record was outstanding too—he served on General MacArthur’s staff, rose very rapidly, and was discharged a full colonel, one rank higher than mine. He was starting a promising career as a lawyer and diplomat.

Once Jane got married I had hopes that we might become tolerant of one another. She and Jack and Olive and I had some good times skiing together in Vermont and going to Margaret Truman’s parties at the White House. But any success I had at IBM seemed to burn Jane up. I finally saw just how competitive she felt toward me during a visit to her house in the spring of 1950. There were pictures and trophies of Jack everywhere—Jack as an oarsman, Jack as a track star, Jack as this, Jack as that. Jane knew I was a little envious of Jack because every opportunity I had missed in my youth he had hit on the head. She saw me looking at mementos of his war career and said, “Tom, did you know that Jack was a full colonel?” She was needling me because I hadn’t made it to that grade. I completely lost my temper. “Yeah, of course I know he was a full colonel. But I was the one flying airplanes all over the world!”

There were always certain things Dad could say that would tick me off in ten seconds. After this episode, telling me to be nice to Jane was one of them, and holding Jack up as an example was another. Jack and I got along fine, but Dad was never convinced I meant him well. He’d say, “I don’t know why you object to your brother-in-law. He is a very thoughtful fellow. He thinks very carefully before he speaks.” His implication was clear: Jack had the discipline and self-control that I lacked. I’d rise to the bait every time.

There were times in those early years when Dad and I really got along—generally when he relaxed his grip enough to let me run parts of IBM as I knew I could. As executive vice president, I was now IBM’s number-two man, practically speaking, even though Dad had arranged things, perhaps wisely, to keep George Phillips as a buffer between us. He did this by shuffling titles, promoting Phillips to president and kicking himself upstairs to the new position of chairman.

In my new job I was responsible for a great deal more than our sales operation. I was supposed to oversee all of IBM’s manufacturing, which meant that I had to find a way quickly to become somebody in the eyes of more than nine thousand factory workers. They were tremendously loyal to Dad, they’d been loyal to Kirk, but they barely knew me. Dad saw that this could be a problem, and six months after I got promoted, he called me to his office and handed me an envelope. “Here’s your opportunity to endear yourself to the factory people,” he said. “Why don’t you talk to them?”

It was an anonymous letter complaining about the working conditions in one of our plants. It said, “We have fifty people working in a building that was designed to be a warehouse. It isn’t properly heated and there’s only one toilet. It is a disgrace to have IBM people working this way.” I left the next day, and when I reached the factory, I found that conditions were exactly as described. Somebody had decided May was a warm enough month for the furnace to be overhauled. They’d torn it to pieces, and then a cold snap hit, so everybody was miserable. I did what I thought Dad would have done. I got temporary heaters put in within ninety minutes of my arrival. Within two hours I had men cutting foundations for new toilets in the back. Then I called all the workers together. I took a stepladder and climbed up on it and said, “I want to read you this letter. Unhappily it’s unsigned, because I would like to give a raise and a promotion to the man who wrote it. I wish he’d had enough confidence in me to sign his name. But he’s absolutely right. Those men with jackhammers are putting in eight more toilets and we’re going to permanently improve the building’s heat.” It was a happy way for me to begin my duties in manufacturing, and word of what I’d done spread through all our plants.

Dad was pleased when I got back to New York and told him of my performance on the stepladder. It showed I was learning. What may have pleased him even more was that IBM was beginning to make money from some of my earlier decisions. For example, thanks to a personnel change I’d made the year after Charley Kirk died, our typewriter division was about to earn its first profit. Ever since Dad had bought the Electro-Matic Typewriter Company in 1933, we’d been trying to sell American business on the virtues of electric typewriters. Dad thought they were a sure bet, because they were fast and neat and enabled the women in the office to type without knocking their manicures to pieces. But the machines were several times more expensive than ordinary typewriters, and after the war they still hadn’t caught on. Our annual typewriter sales were only eleven million dollars, and we’d lost money in the business every year. So in early 1947 I told Norman Collister, the division chief, “I’d rather sell this operation outright than keep bleeding forever.” I was sharp with him, but he came back at me just as strongly.

“We’re still getting our feet under us.”

“It’s pretty hard for me to convince myself of that because we’ve been at it for thirteen years,” I said. “We have a big distribution system, a trained sales force, and there’s been no lack of money for development. If we were going to make it, we should have made it by now.”

“I can’t really talk to you about this, Tom,” he said. “You just don’t understand the typewriter business.”

That was as good as telling me that we had to accept losing money all the time. So I went to Dad and said, “You can’t go on with that guy. The only way he can run the business is in the red. Let’s get somebody else in.” I had in mind H. Wisner Miller, a man I had known since before the war. Wiz was a few years older than I, and I admired him because he’d had to fight real adversity. He came from a prominent family and he’d been a Princeton freshman in 1929 when the stock market crashed. His father lost everything and Wiz had to quit school. The only job he could find at first was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in the Bronx. One of IBM’s directors knew him and introduced him to Dad, who hired him to sell typewriters because he liked Miller’s spirit.

Choosing Wiz to run the typewriter division had been a big gamble. Dad went along with me, even though it meant jumping Miller from a fairly low position over men Dad knew a lot better. But Wiz had exactly the sales approach necessary to sell those machines. The IBM method for selling punch-card systems was much too analytical for electric typewriters. You couldn’t overcomplicate it. What Wiz brought was zip and enthusiasm and leadership. I loved to watch him inspire his men at sales conventions. He’d have a typewriter onstage under a spotlight, all by itself. Wiz would walk up in his blue serge suit, look at it, and extend a finger to flick away an imaginary speck of dust. Then he’d step back and say, “A magnificent machine. I hate to see even a speck of dust on that machine. It’s so beautiful.” He taught his salesmen to use this blarney on the secretaries, and started making the typewriters in different colors like red and tan. He even made a white typewriter that my father presented to Pope Pius XII. A lot of systems men called Miller corny and simplistic, but he was one of IBM’s great sales leaders. In 1949 the machines caught on and for years after that the division grew at a 30 percent annual rate. My first important personnel move had been a great success.